Nick Minchin
regrets failing to ­convince John Howard to leave politics in 2006 and failing to have the courage of his convictions on Iraq and the constitutional underpinnings for WorkChoices, and he plans to set up a Friends of Carbon Dioxide club when he leaves Parliament.

The long-time Liberal Party apparatchik and powerbroker gave his valedictory speech to the Senate yesterday and it was full of the whimsy that so often marks these speeches.

The man who held the finance portfolio for the longest period ever, who was instrumental in the coup that brought Tony Abbott his party’s leadership, and who remains a staunch ­climate change cynic, will leave Parliament this week after 18 years.

He told the Senate political life was a balance sheet “and while I hope history will judge mine as having a plus sign at the bottom, some may well judge that the positives and the negatives are fairly evenly balanced".

On the positive side was his long time in the finance portfolio and as the only finance minister “whose every budget produced a surplus".

Senator Minchin steered the government side through the longest Senate debate in history – on the Wik legislation – which rank as the most impressive legislative debates by all those involved in living memory.

On the negative side, as a committed federalist, he regretted the “creeping centralism" which afflicts both major political parties and the failure of his “lonely and quixotic battle" against compulsory voting.

He was “singularly unsuccessful in my internal advocacy of a lower rate of immigration", in establishing a national radioactive waste repository in the central north of South Australia and in getting support from his own party to sell “a government-owned electricity business called Snowy Hydro", or in selling Medibank Private.

Related Quotes

Company Profile

“I failed to have the courage of my conservative convictions concerning my serious reservations at the time about the US plans for the invasion of Iraq," he said. “And I did not have sufficient courage of my federalist convictions concerning my reservations about the use of the Constitution’s corporations power to underpin our government’s WorkChoices legislation.

He hoped the Coalition understood the lesson of its 2007 defeat – that voters only ever accept incrementalism, not radicalism, on industrial relations.

“Finally, I regret my incapacity to create the circumstances in which John Howard might have seen the wisdom in retiring on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of his prime ministership in March 2006."

He joked that he was contemplating setting up an organisation called the Friends of Carbon Dioxide. “Membership will of course be open to all, including the plants whose very existence depends on CO2", he said.